Aces High

by Alan Clark

  With the American declaration of war on Germany on 6 April, both sides foresaw huge American reinforcements for the Allied war effort, and Germany instituted a major programme of rearmament to beat the Allies before the weight of American production and manpower could make itself felt.

  As early as 3 June 1917 there was a conference attended by all senior officers of Kogenluft at which the situation was reviewed in the light not only of the mounting threat from the RFC but of the longer term menace (in fact considerably overrated) of American industry following the declaration of war by the United States. The aerial programme had also to fit in with the OHL (German Army High Command) strategy which was for a knockout blow on the Western Front in the spring of 1918 – this also being calculated on the necessity of striking before the American scale of reinforcement became too great.

  The plan, known as the Amerika-Programm, had to be complete in all its aspects by 1 March 1918 and provided for:

  1. Enlargement of the thirteen existing flying training schools; 2. Formation of a second Jasta training school; 3. Aircraft production to be doubled to 2,000 per month; 4. Engine production to be increased from 1,250 to 2,500 per month; 5. The reallocation of 7,000 skilled workers from other branches of the armed forces; 6. Machine-gun production to be increased to 1,500 per month; 7. Aviation fuel production to be raised from 6,000 to 12,000 tons per month. There were a number of other provisions relating to the necessary machine tools and raw materials, especially aluminium.

  Chapter Five

  Aces

  One must first overcome the

  inner schweinehund

  Manfred von Richthofen

  A great divide separated the novice from the experienced. It was a gulf that separates those who are going to die from those who may survive.

  The new faces, nervous, enthusiastic, with their playing-field grins, were ignored, or almost. They arrived, unloaded their kit; often the previous occupant’s effects and possessions were still strewn about. They had the worst tents, the surliest batmen. It was recognized that their stay would be only temporary. In 1917 the life expectancy of a subaltern in the RFC from posting until death was eleven days.

  Cowardice was a deadly sin. The veto was absolute. In discussion fear was masked by bravado – ‘Chaps, here goes!’ Only in the privacy of diaries, very occasionally in letters to relatives, do these forebodings emerge :

  There have been two changes in the bunk next to me since April Fool’s Day (last week!) I wouldn’t sleep in it for all the tea in China.

  Poor old B – caught it yesterday, down in flames over Menin. He had been acting strange for the last few days, wandering about speaking to himself.

  From a diary:

  Turned back again today with mag failure (ha ha). In a blue funk in case Sgt. Mellish ‘told’ on me. But he dutifully took the whole thing to bits and reassembled it and kept mum.

  Garett has been moved to a room of his own. He had been kicking up such a shindig in the night with his dreams of burning, spinning and such like that we three complained and got him billetted solo.

  Squadrons varied in their attitude to new-comers. Some commanders took great care to nurture their replacements and avoid exposing them to serious risks in their first days. They were taken on personally conducted tours of the battle area, were changed round with experienced crew members (new pilot with experienced observer and vice versa) and were positioned second and third in the standard tactical formation, known as the Vee, on offensive patrols so that they could take their cue from the leader (for one of the beginners’ most serious defects was his inability to see the enemy).

  But in other units they were left to fend for themselves. Experienced flyers strongly disliked the idea of putting themselves at risk by taking up a raw observer. Hardened observers who had survived many critical battles, and whose nerves cannot have gone unaffected, refused to put their fate in the hands of a young pilot fresh from England whose combat ability was completely untried. There were many bad instances in that terrible spring of 1917 when new pilots flew at the tail of the squadron because they were ordered there. At the first sign of combat the hardened tip would break off hustling its way down and home in the first hectic minutes of the dog fight and leaving the apprentices to be cut up by the enemy. ‘Missing’ was a more comfortable definition of a casualty than ‘seen to go down in flames’.

  Some, very few, could make the transition from novice to ace. Oswald Boelcke, one of the first and father of fighter tactics and organization had achieved this and, as he was much photographed, it is possible to trace in his features the scars of that experience. First the early pictures; shaven head, penetrating blue eyes, the confidence and tenu of a chivalrous young Prussian. But then, frighteningly soon, the shadows form; the eyes enlarge, but hollow in their sockets. The flesh falls away from neck and hand and wrist, accentuating the line of bone and sinew. In group pictures those round him are evidently pleased to be in his company and reflect his glory, some are even smiling. But never Boelcke. Already he has seen too many planes burning. It was the practice of the Germans to visit the site of their opponent’s crash in order to confirm their combat report and only the final question concerned Boelcke – would his own death be ‘fercht oder getrocknet’ (literally ‘wet or dry’ i.e. burned or mutilated to death). It was ‘fercht’ following a collision in combat on 28 October 1916.

  This same expression can be seen in the eyes of Georges Guynemer, the French ace of Les Cigognes, France’s élite fighter unit. There is a picture of him taken towards the end of his life, showing a man razor thin, hollow-eyed, bedecked with medals and honours, staring not at, but beyond the photographer, with eyes de-focused, as if in a trance.

  Guynemer had been right through the battle of Verdun where the Cigognes were based at Nancy. In June of 1917 when he was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honour, his score of kills stood at forty-five. Now he had to bring the Cigognes north to help the RFC clear the unfamiliar skies of Flanders while first the Battle of Messines and then of Passchendaele were fought out below. He was granted three precious days leave. His father begged him to retire and take a position as an instructor and technical adviser. The old man was shocked by his son’s appearance and knew, intuitively, that if Guynemer returned to combat, he would never see him again. But Guynemer was a victim of his own publicity machine. Although half-persuaded, he claimed that he could not retire from combat for fear of what would be said. ‘On dira’, he told his father, ‘that I have ceased to fight because I have won all the awards.’ In vain his father argued that he could always return, that he would be stronger and more ardent and that when he did so everyone would understand. In vain he reminded his son of all the crashes, the forced landings and wounds which he had sustained and how providence could not look after him forever. ‘There is a limit to human strength’, Guynemer’s father told him. But this, the philosophy of age and experience, was unacceptable. Before he went back to the front, Guynemer told his father, ‘Indeed there is a limit. But it is only there to be excelled. If one has not given everything, one has given nothing.’

  When Guynemer arrived at St Pol-sur-mer where the Cigognes were now based, he learned that one of his closest friends, Capitaine A. Heurtaux had been seriously wounded the day before. His own favourite Spad was unserviceable (it had been brought to St Pol from Nancy by an inexperienced pilot when Guynemer was on leave). Incredibly, Guynemer was forced to fly his sorties in second-rate aircraft – those awaiting replacement pilots or, worse still, in the queue for workshop attention. On one day three different aeroplanes had engine or structural failure while he was flying them; in each case he brought off a forced landing. A less skilful pilot would have been killed. Twice his guns had jammed in combat. For four consecutive days he flew five patrols of two and a half hours each, but without scoring a victory. Guynemer was now fast becoming a victim of a paranoiac condition. At night he could not sleep but would pace the floor of his bedroom, talking to himself, or go and
rouse his mechanics to swing the prop of his aircraft and run up the engine under the light of the moon. He believed that there was a whispering about him in the mess, that he was deliberately avoiding combat because of his inferiority at the controls of worn out aeroplanes … ‘such as the ordinary pilot has to fly’.

  Word got back to Paris and two emissaries were dispatched to investigate. Capitaine Felix Brocard, the Cigognes’ Commanding Officer, and Commandant Jean du Peuty, commander of the French Air Force Aviation Staff at GWL (the French General Headquarters), arrived at St Pol at nine o’clock on the morning of 11 September. The sky was overcast and a light drizzle was falling. All the Cigognes were grounded with the exception of Guynemer and a sous-lieutenant, Benjamen Bozon-Verduraz, whom Guynemer had ordered to accompany him on an interception flight which had taken off at 8.30 a.m.

  While the delegation from the Air Ministry waited impatiently at St Pol, Guynemer and Bozon had located an enemy two-seater over Poelcapelle and staged a conventional three o’clock and six o’clock attack (one coming in from the quarter and one from the rear). But it was a trap. Three Albatri escorting the two-seater behind and 3,000 feet above it, dived on the two Spads. Bozon saw them in time and turned to attack head-on, escaping in the mêlée. But Guynemer was never seen again. A few days later the Germans announced he had been shot down by a Leutnant Kurt Wissemann. No trace of Guynemer’s body or aircraft was ever found. The very special Spad which du Peuty had had delivered that day from the factory at Buc was already second-hand.

  With the possible exception of Manfred von Richthofen, none of the aces preserved their initial sang froid. Richthofen was totally cold-blooded, incapable of any close personal relationship, and his very aloofness gave him a special strength and heightened the devotion which his colleagues and subordinates paid him. He never relaxed, seldom smiled, disapproved of any slackening of discipline or protocol. He had no intimate friends – although there were many who idolized him without their affection being returned. ‘The most beautiful thing in all creation is my Danish Hound, Moritz’, wrote Richthofen. Moritz slept on Richthofen’s bed, and even flew on occasion although he must have weighed over a hundred pounds. On these flights Richthofen said that Moritz ‘… quite enjoyed himself and looked about intelligently’.

  But with this one exception Richthofen had no weaknesses. From his earliest youth he had found satisfaction only in killing things. He was a crack shot and kept the Jasta in game wherever they were stationed. A Prussian by birth, he had served with the Uhlans at the outbreak of war, transferred to the air service and flown as an observer, serving for several months under a mad consumptive pilot called Zeuner, who wanted to die and used to close the range to an impossibly dangerous proximity in combat. Richthofen’s nerve held and after his experiences with Zeuner, nothing could ever have seemed quite as bad. He retained his cavalry breeches and always wore them with boots and a fur cap with ear flaps and a thin leather, hip-length jacket, belted and with a wide fur collar. After his victory over Lanoe Hawker, Richthofen adopted the practice of bringing back trophies from every aeroplane that he had shot down, just as formerly he had filled his mother’s house with tusks and heads and antlers.

  All the aces were kept, or kept themselves, in the firing line far too long (indeed Richthofen’s own equanimity was undoubtedly helped as much by his frequent lay-offs as by his mastery of ‘the inner Schweinehund’). All could count and see how, statistically, their own death was a measurable happening. Superstition was intense and widespread. No pilot would go into a dive after his enemy without touching wood or some private talisman. Each narrow escape would be attributed to a particular piece of luck or propitiation of the fates, just as friends and colleagues who had suffered death from chance shots or aircraft breaking up were remembered on reflection to have flouted the mores of superstition.

  Once Jasta 11 suffered a particularly unnerving experience. On 17 September 1916, a BE 2C emerged from a cloud bank and flew straight into their formation. The Jasta broke up and took it in turn to attack the lumbering two-seater, whose crew made no effort to defend themselves, each pilot filling it with lead. The German pilots closed the range shorter and shorter, firing until their guns jammed. Pieces flew off the BE 2C, but it continued to fly a level course due east, finally disappearing into a towering bank of alto cumulus.

  That evening the curious incident was the subject of excitable discussion, when the news came through that the BE 2C had made a perfect landing in a field thirty miles inside the German lines. The petrol tank was bone dry and both members of the crew were dead with over fifty bullets in their bodies. A report from another Jasta indicated that the BE 2C had been attacked and damaged (but not seen to crash) some minutes before it had flown through Richthofen’s formation. One of the Circus has described how: ‘there was a distinct feeling of uneasiness at the news; there was something eerie about shooting at a crew of dead men. Was there an omen in the way they had ignored our bullets?’

  But Richthofen was equal to the situation. At the end of the meal he hammered on the table and called for a toast:

  A glorious death! Fight on and fly on to the last drop of blood and the last drop of petrol – to the last beat of the heart and the last kick of the motor; a death for a knight – a toast for his fellows, friend and foe.

  As the aces looked back over their own escapes and ordeals -particularly when they had suffered wounding and later returned to active duty – deep neuroses began to build up, their effect compounded by reflective guilt concerning all those pilots whom they had burned or shot, and a dark certainty that retribution awaited them.

  One of his colleagues has described the nightly ordeal of Read Chambers, an American ace who had been in continuous combat for three months. He was:

  … tormented by a nightmare: a face. The face would appear vague and distant, and would slowly come nearer until it seemed as if the face and Chambers were literally nose to nose, staring at each other. That’s all, just staring. Then Chambers would wake up, his sleep spoiled. Who was it? Chambers was not superstitious, but it was a torment not to know to whom this disembodied face belonged. Was it a man he had killed? Or was it the man waiting for him in the sun?

  Some of the aces, men like Albert Ball or Oswald Boelcke, did indeed start as carefree personifications of their country’s youth. Their metamorphosis was a matter of weeks and months. But in others the death-wish was latent from the start. A miserable childhood, a lonely and introspective life, the handicaps of physical frailty or poor health, found release in the endless vista of the skies and the private trial of individual combat. Raoul Lufbery never saw his mother. His father deserted the home when the little boy was six years old. Bullied and neglected by relatives and neighbours, Lufbery focused all his love and ambition on the absent figure of his father and by the age of nineteen had saved enough money to attempt the journey to the United States to try and find him. Lufbery did not have enough money to cross the Atlantic from France and his attempt to stow away was discovered and brutally punished. He turned direction and made his way around the Mediterranean down through the Balkans and across Turkey with groups of itinerant labourers and vagrants, crossing North Africa in Arab caravans and finally taking a tramp steamer from Casablanca. Lufbery arrived in New York on the very day that his father, who had now become prosperous, sailed for Europe with the intention of finding his only son – and the two never met again. In despair the young Lufbery continued round the world, eking out a living wherever he could. He did a spell as a soldier of fortune in Indo-China and then met up with one of the earliest ‘stunt’ flyers and enlisted as his mechanic, teaching himself the theory of engineering. Next Lufbery taught himself to fly and finding himself back in France after the outbreak of war, he enlisted and sought death in the clouds. For a year he taught American volunteers until, almost accidentally, he was shot down attacking a two-seater in low cloud over his own aerodrome, with his own score standing at seventeen kills.

  Werner Voss, Ri
chthofen’s closest rival, stood in marked contrast to the Prussian nobleman. Of humble origin, he had enlisted in the Hussars when still under age. He had a passion for machinery and motorcycles, and graduated naturally into the Air Service, where he flew as an observer through the first months of the Battle of the Somme before being transferred to single-seaters in September. When he left his old unit, Voss recorded that not one single member of its strength who had been present on the day that he joined was still alive. His experience there left him with a lasting compassion for two-seater crews – the poor devils (verachtliken) as he called them – and he always made a practice of shooting down enemy two-seaters by a burst of fire into the engine-compartment so that the pilot might have a sporting chance of bringing the aeroplane down alive. Voss had crossed swords with James McCudden (the man who a year later was to lead the formation which killed him). McCudden was flying with three others in DH 2s and Voss managed to escape by his superior aerobatics. At the time McCudden recorded the incident: ‘… a really clever Hun today. He knew his business alright, turning far tighter than we could manage. Last time he was within fifty feet of me and I swear he was grinning all over his face.’

  Voss soon graduated to Albatri and became a flight leader in Jasta 2, Boelcke’s old Jasta which had already lost two of its commanders. In January and February, Voss raised his score to twenty-two – uncomfortably close to that of von Richthofen (at that time twenty-seven). Then he was switched south to clear the skies of French aeroplanes during the Nivelle offensive of April 1917. Voss did not return to the British sector until July by which time the first of the SE 5s, Camels and Bristol Fighters were beginning to crack the domination of the Albatri. Voss was given command of Jasta 10 and like Richthofen and the other leading aces, appropriated to himself one of the first Fokker triplanes to be delivered. It was painted light olive green with Maltese crosses on a white tail plane and a white ring on the fuselage. The wheel discs and wing undersurfaces were coloured light blue and the front of the nacelle housing the Oberursel rotary engine was painted to depict a terrifying grimace around the two eyes of the air intake, in the manner of a totem pole. Although he led Jasta 10 with great success, Voss’s preference was still for solitary patrols at dawn and dusk and, ultimately, it was on one of these that he met his death.